WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY SAMUEL BECKETT THE PROBLEM OF INTERPRETATION IN BECKETT’S OWN STAGE ADAPTATION OF ENDGAME
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY SAMUEL BECKETT THE PROBLEM OF INTERPRETATION IN BECKETT’S OWN STAGE ADAPTATION OF ENDGAME

Summary/Abstract: Throughout his career as a playwright, Samuel Beckett has always expected the performance not to fill up the text with spare meaning, but to be as close as possible to the composing elements of the text. The present article aims at demonstrating the assumption that the actor’s presence on stage inhibits the director from staging a play without interpretation. This hypothesis will be sustained by the questioning of the San Quentin Drama Workshop’s performance of Endgame, which was directed by Beckett himself in 1980. According to Beckett’s idea that a theatre performance is defined by the space and the characters, a first comparative analysis of the written text’s space with the one on the stage, will be followed by that of the play’s characters and those who are brought into being by the actors of the San Quentin Drama Workshop.

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